Building the 50/50 Voting App

For our upcoming exhibition 50/50: Audience and Experts Curate the Paper Collection, we’re trying something a bit different. As you can probably tell from the title, we’re allowing our audience to help us curate a show. The idea is that our chief curator, Darsie Alexander, will curate 50% of the show, and the audience will select from a group of 180 different print works for the other half.

As with most things presented to New Media, the question was posed, “how best do we do this?”. The exhibition is being hung in the same room as Benches and Binoculars, so the obvious answer was to use the kiosk already there as the voting platform for the show. With this in mind I started to think of different ways to present the voting app itself.

My initial idea was to do a “4-up” design. Display four artworks and ask people to choose their favorite. The idea was that this would make people confirm a choice in comparison to others. If you see some of what you’re selecting against, it can make it easier to know whether you want specific works in the show or not. But it also has the same effect in reverse. If you have two artworks that you really like, it can be just as hard to only be able to choose one. The other limitation? After coming up with the 4-up idea, we also decided to add iPhones into the mix as a possible voting platform (as well as iPads, an general internet browsers). The images on the iPhone’s screen were much to small to make decent comparisons on.

Nate suggested instead using a “hot or not” style voting system. One work that you basically vote yes or no on. This had the small downfall of not being able to compare a work against others, but allowed us to negate the “analysis paralysis” of the 4-up model. It also worked much better on mobile devices.

The second big decision we faced was “what do we show”? I had assumed in the beginning that we’d be showing label copy of every work like we do just about everywhere but it was suggested early on that we do no such thing. We didn’t want to influence voters by having a title or artist on every piece. With works by Chuck Close and Andy Warhol mixed into the print selections, it’s much too easy to see their name and vote for them simply because of their name. We wanted people to vote on what work they wanted to see, not what artist they wanted to see.

Both of these decisions proved to be pivotal in the popularity of the voting app. It made the voting app very streamlined and simplified. With 180 works to go through it makes it much easier to get through the entire thing. Choices are quick and easy. The results screen after voting on each artwork shows the current percentage of no to yes votes. This is a bit of a psychological pull. You as a user know what you think of this artwork, but what do others think about it? The only way to find out is to vote.

Because of this the voting app has been a success far beyond what we even thought it would be. I thought if we got 5,000-10,000 votes we would be doing pretty well. Half way through the voting process now, we have well over 100,000 votes. We’ve had over 1,500 users voting on the artworks. We’ve collected over 500 email addresses wanting to know who the winners are when all the voting is tallied. We never expected anything this good and we have several weeks of voting yet to come.

One interesting outcome of all of these votes has been the number of yes’s to no’s over all of the works. Since the works are presented randomly (well, pseudo randomly for each user), one might expect that half the works would have more yes than no votes, and vice versa. But that’s not turned out to be the case. About 80% of the works have more no votes than yes’s. Why is this?

There are various theories. Perhaps people are more selective if they know something will be on view in public. Perhaps people in general are just overly negative. Or perhaps people really don’t like any of our artwork!

But one of the more interesting theories of why this is goes back to the language we decided to use. Originally we were going to use the actual words “Yes” and “No” to answer the question “Would you like to see this artwork on view?”. This later got changed to “Definitely” and “Maybe Not”. Notice how the affirmative answer has much more weight behind it: “Yes, most definitely!”, whereas the negative option leaves you a bit of wiggle room “Eh, maybe not”. It’s this differentiation between being sure of a decision and perhaps not so sure that may have contributed to people saying no more often than yes.

Which begs the question, what if it was changed? What if the options instead were “Definitely Not” and “Sure”? Now the definitive answer is on the negative and the positive answer has more room to slush around (“Hell no!” vs “Ahh sure, why not?!”). It would be interesting to see what the results would have been with this simple change in language. Maybe next time. This round, we’re going to keep our metrics the same throughout to keep it consistant.